Health-Care Facilities Embrace RFID
Many hospitals that deployed RFID for a single application, such as tracking expensive medical equipment, quickly realized benefits and a return on their investment. Now, they're broadening their use of the technology to rein in costs and improve patient care.
By Elizabeth Wasserman
Oct. 1, 2010—Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center, a five-hospital facility in Greenville, S.C., had a persistent and costly problem: losing or misplacing expensive medical equipment. It's a common problem at hospitals both large and small, and Greenville officials learned that other facilities were solving it with radio frequency identification. So in 2008, they began using RFID to track their high-end equipment.
The first application, deployed at Greenville Memorial Hospital, involved RFID-tagging 600 pieces of mobile equipment in a 32-room operating suite—including infusion devices, OR tables, stretchers and X-ray machines—with active Wi-Fi tags, leveraging the Wi-Fi network in the operating suite. "We were able to tag those devices and simply pull up their whereabouts on a computer screen at any given time and locate them in a matter of keystrokes," says John Mateka, executive director of Greenville Hospital's materials service group. "It saved us a lot of time and frustration and it improved productivity."
It also saved Greenville a substantial amount of money, by delaying purchases of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of replacement equipment, Mateka says. The hospital saw a return on its RFID investment in less than a year. Greenville administrators were so impressed with the results that they decided to expand their use of RFID to track 5,000 devices hospital-wide, including small surgical devices with less expensive passive tags, so those items didn't "inadvertently get thrown in the trash," Mateka says.
Oct. 1, 2010—Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center, a five-hospital facility in Greenville, S.C., had a persistent and costly problem: losing or misplacing expensive medical equipment. It's a common problem at hospitals both large and small, and Greenville officials learned that other facilities were solving it with radio frequency identification. So in 2008, they began using RFID to track their high-end equipment.
The first application, deployed at Greenville Memorial Hospital, involved RFID-tagging 600 pieces of mobile equipment in a 32-room operating suite—including infusion devices, OR tables, stretchers and X-ray machines—with active Wi-Fi tags, leveraging the Wi-Fi network in the operating suite. "We were able to tag those devices and simply pull up their whereabouts on a computer screen at any given time and locate them in a matter of keystrokes," says John Mateka, executive director of Greenville Hospital's materials service group. "It saved us a lot of time and frustration and it improved productivity."
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It also saved Greenville a substantial amount of money, by delaying purchases of "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of replacement equipment, Mateka says. The hospital saw a return on its RFID investment in less than a year. Greenville administrators were so impressed with the results that they decided to expand their use of RFID to track 5,000 devices hospital-wide, including small surgical devices with less expensive passive tags, so those items didn't "inadvertently get thrown in the trash," Mateka says.
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